Lizelle Mendoza, a Multiple Sclerosis Society ambassador, was diagnosed with MS eight years ago at the age of 18, seven years after she had begun to show symptoms.
Faced with the fear that came with her diagnosis, Mendoza kept her relapsing-remitting MS a secret, afraid that her friends wouldn’t want to support her.
“I was just afraid,” she said. “I was very self-conscious. I had symptoms since I was 11.”
Mendoza’s symptoms started in her eyes, with complete, but temporary, blindness. The disease has since spread through her body and has affected her mobility, she now walks with a limp.
It was hard for Mendonza to find support and answers since no one else in her family had the disease.
“I kept to myself, I was very isolated.”
Speaking out
Her advocacy started when she was 18. She signed up for the MS walk and brought her friends along. They continued the tradition ever since and Saturday’s walk marks nine events they’ve taken part in together. Mendoza also began to volunteer with the MS society.
But Mendoza didn’t tell her friends she herself had MS for another two years after they started walking.
“I wish I would have told myself not to be afraid, to kind of just open up. If I had spoken to other people earlier, I would have gotten help sooner and I wouldn’t have been so self-conscious and so alone,” Mendoza told CBC’s Radio Noon.
“Disability has such a negative stigma attached to it, I don’t see myself as disabled.”
Not only did Mendoza struggle with the stigma of having a disability, she said she also struggled with the misconception that MS is only found in older people. In fact, the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada says the most common period of diagnosis is between the ages of 15 and 40.
Statistics Canada estimates that 93,535 Canadians are living with MS.
“It’s an individual disease and it’s invisible,” she said Friday.
One foot in front of the other
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